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When positioning mentoring as part of a knowledge management strategy, most organizations focus on how skill- and role-specific mentoring enables leaders and experts to pass on experiential knowledge to younger, less experienced colleagues. As I described in the first two articles of this three-part series, structured knowledge transfer is a key aspect of mentoring's value proposition and one of the biggest reasons why KM programs should incorporate mentoring into their suite of approaches. Mentoring can become an effective catalyst to break down silos, build boundary-spanning professional relationshipsand improve the quality of collaborative interaction enterprisewide.

Michael E. D. Koenig

Professor and former and founding dean of the College of Information and Computer Science at Long Island University

Michael Koenig is Professor and former and founding dean of the College of Information and Computer Science at Long Island University. His career has included senior management positions in the information industry: Manager of Research Information Services at Pfizer Inc., Director of Development at the Institute for Scientific Information, Vice President – North America at Swets & Zeitlinger, and Vice President Data Management at Tradenet; as well as academic positions: Associate Professor at Columbia University, and Dean and Professor at Dominican University. His Ph.D. in information science is from Drexel University, his MBA in mathematical methods and computers, and his MA in library and information science are from the University of Chicago, and his undergraduate degree is from Yale University. A Fulbright Scholar in Argentina, he is the author of more than one hundred professional and scholarly publications, and is the co-editor of Knowledge Management for the Information Professional (2000), Knowledge Management – Lessons Learned, What Works and What Doesn’t (2003), and Knowledge Management in Practice: Connections and Context (2008), all published by Information Today for the American Society for Information Science and Technology. A member of the editorial board of more than a dozen journals, he is also the past president of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. In 2005 he was awarded the Jason Farradane Award “in recognition of outstanding work in the information field.”